What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast

Laura Vanderkam’s What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast is part pep talk, part field guide for anyone who has wished their days felt less like a blur of obligation and more like a deliberate life. She starts with the chaos she knows firsthand: small children who refuse socks, work email that explodes before sunrise, and the uncanny ability of a morning to evaporate before we get to anything that matters. From there she makes her central claim—the hours before most people wake up are the closest thing we have to found time—and spends the rest of the book proving how accomplished people redirect those hours toward their biggest ambitions.

Vanderkam draws on interviews with CEOs, entrepreneurs, academics, artists, and overcommitted parents who somehow still nurture passions. She layers their anecdotes with studies on willpower depletion, circadian rhythms, and habit formation. The pattern that emerges is striking. People who seem almost superhuman are not expanding the clock; they are front-loading the actions that fight for priority later: long runs, deep work, proactive networking, sacred family rituals, even spiritual practices that remind them why they are hustling in the first place. Instead of letting mornings be the warm-up act to “real life,” they treat the early hours as the main event for the work that defines them.

To explain why this matters, Vanderkam dissects an average day. By late afternoon most of us make decisions while mentally fried. Every email, meeting, tantrum, and traffic jam chips away at the self-control we need to choose wisely. Mornings, in contrast, arrive before the world’s demands pile up. We still possess the energy to lace up shoes, open a blank document, or pray without distraction. Vanderkam cites research showing that willpower is like a muscle: strongest when it is fresh, fatigued as the day drags on. That is why evening plans to study, compose, or meal prep so often dissolve into Netflix and takeout. Make those commitments at sunrise and the odds of follow-through skyrocket.

The book is not a sermon about waking up at 4:00 a.m. so you can squeeze in twenty productivity hacks. Vanderkam is careful to point out that early rising is the result, not the point. Sleep-deprived heroics backfire. What distinguishes the people she profiles is that they align morning routines with values-driven goals. If you want to write a novel while holding down a day job, the block from 5:30 to 7:30 a.m. can be sacred creative time before the office intrudes. If you want a genuinely close family, breakfast can transform from a messy pit stop into a micro-ritual where kids tell stories, partners check in, and everyone heads out feeling seen.

The middle chapters showcase three common buckets of morning investment. The first is personal priorities—health, creativity, and development that sustain long-term success. Vanderkam features leaders who schedule workouts before dawn not because they love treadmills, but because they understand that fitness feeds stamina for everything else. She shares how Harvard biologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi walks and journals at sunrise to harness flow, and how novelist Sarah Blakley Carter protects early hours for creative brainstorming before financial meetings begin. Others study a foreign language, rehearse music, or work through online courses. The shared wisdom: reclaiming even ninety focused minutes daily can add up to hundreds of hours in a year, enough to finish enormous projects while most people are still groggy.

The second bucket is career priorities. Vanderkam argues that reactive work—the emails and status updates—will fill every available space unless we carve out time for proactive, strategic actions. She highlights executives who conduct thinking time before their inbox opens, entrepreneurs who map quarterly priorities while the office is quiet, and sales leaders who write pitch decks at daybreak so meetings become a formality. Because mornings endure fewer interruptions, they are perfect for tasks that demand concentration, high-level planning, or difficult conversations. Rather than let urgent requests dictate the agenda, the people Vanderkam profiles choose their most important professional move and tackle it before breakfast.

The third bucket is relationship priorities. It is easy to assume family bonding belongs to evenings, but Vanderkam notes how often nights are filled with homework, extracurriculars, deadline spillover, or sheer exhaustion. Couples who want to catch up without phones buzzing may schedule morning coffee dates. Parents prep big breakfasts on Fridays or lead sunrise walks so weekends feel less frantic. Friends who live in different time zones maintain weekly video calls before the day splinters off. These rituals prove that mornings can be surprisingly social when we plan for them, and the shared momentum spills into the rest of the day.

Of course, simply declaring “I will be a morning person” rarely works. Vanderkam dedicates the second half of the book to a five-step framework for making over mornings for good. Step one is to track your time. For at least a week she asks readers to log their hours honestly. Where does bedtime creep later than intended? How many minutes disappear into social media loops? Time tracking is uncomfortable precisely because it reveals how much agency we have. Vanderkam promises that once you see patterns in black and white, you can reallocate them.

Step two is to picture the perfect morning. This is more than a to-do list. It is a vision exercise: When you imagine an ideal start to the day, what are you doing and how do you feel? Maybe you want to run three miles, read with your toddler, or meditate. Naming that picture makes it tangible and motivates you to restructure your schedule. Step three, think through the logistics, turns the dream into a plan. Vanderkam walks readers through bedtime adjustments, childcare coordination, setting out running gear, prepping breakfast the night before, and any other practical detail that could derail good intentions. Early success is less about heroic willpower and more about engineering friction out of the system.

Step four is to build the habit gradually. Vanderkam suggests moving wake-up times earlier in fifteen-minute increments instead of making a drastic leap. She encourages choosing one anchor activity to install—perhaps writing 500 words or practicing guitar for twenty minutes—and repeating it until it becomes automatic. Plenty of her case studies started as night owls who inched their schedules earlier only after creating compelling reasons to do so. Step five is to tune up as necessary. Life seasons change. A newborn, a cross-country move, or a new job might require hitting pause, revisiting the time log, and designing a fresh morning script. Morning mastery is not a one-and-done task; it is an ongoing experiment.

Throughout the book Vanderkam preempts common objections. What about people who truly perform better at night? She advises focusing on intention more than clock time: if late-night hours are when you can accomplish high-priority work without sacrificing rest or relationships, protect them. Yet she urges even creative night owls to consider building in a gentle morning ramp that includes reflection, health, or connection, because chaos at sunrise tends to bleed into the rest of the day. What about parents of newborns or shift workers whose schedules are dictated externally? Vanderkam empathizes and notes that intense seasons may require different strategies, such as defining “morning” as whatever block follows your core sleep. The principle remains: identify an island of time you can control and safeguard it fiercely.

One of the book’s most persuasive elements is the case study of working couple James and Kristen, who both have demanding jobs and young children. They were exasperated by evenings that devolved into chores. By logging their time, they realized they could wake at 5:45 a.m., divide breakfast prep, allocate thirty minutes for individual goals (he ran; she wrote a gratitude journal and planned her day), and still leave for work on schedule. Within weeks they reported feeling closer, healthier, and more purposeful, all without adding extra hours. Their story illustrates Vanderkam’s broader thesis: morning investments compound into better days, which compound into a better life.

Vanderkam repeatedly reminds readers that mornings should delight as well as discipline. Pleasure is not a reward after hard work; it can be woven into the routine. One executive treats herself to a quiet latte on the balcony while reading poetry before diving into spreadsheets. A nonprofit leader uses sunrise meetings with her spouse to plan hikes and travel. A pastor lights candles, plays instrumental music, and journals about congregants before sending the kids off to school. These stories keep the book from sounding like a boot camp manual. Instead it becomes a catalogue of small joys that signal to your brain, “This is who I am. This is what matters.”

By the end Vanderkam offers a sample plan for a hypothetical reader who wants to improve fitness, launch a side business, and connect with family. She shows how a 5:30 wake-up could include a thirty-minute workout, breakfast with kids, a quick planning session for the side hustle, and a short reflection period—all wrapped by 8:00 a.m. She acknowledges that some mornings will still be messy, but the point is that you now have a blueprint to return to. The morning is no longer a black box; it is a canvas.

The concluding pages urge readers to try a mini-experiment for two weeks. Choose one meaningful action to tackle before 7:00 a.m., track how you feel, and notice the ripple effects. Vanderkam promises that even if you eventually shift the habit elsewhere, the experiment will teach you volumes about your energy patterns and what you genuinely value. For many readers, the early victory becomes addictive. They taste how calm and confident the rest of the day feels when their priorities are already moving forward.

What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast ultimately reframes mornings from a gauntlet to a gateway. Vanderkam is realistic about hurdles and gentle about setbacks, yet she refuses to accept the narrative that busy equals powerless. Her message radiates through every interview and strategy: when you aim your first hours at what makes you feel most alive—whether that is sweating, praying, learning, strategizing, or loving—the rest of the day begins to orbit that intention. You stop waiting for “someday” and start living the life you imagined in the time you already have.

See also: What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast, Craft a Self-Management Dashboard to Run Your Week Like a CEO, The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry: How to Stay Emotionally Healthy and Spiritually Alive